This article is concerned with the implications of the surprisingly different experimental practices in economics and in areas of psychology relevant to both economists and psychologists, such as behavioral decision making. We consider four features of experimentation in economics, namely, script enactment, repeated trials, performance-based monetary payments, and the proscription against deception, and compare them to experimental practices in psychology, primarily in the area of behavioral decision making. Whereas economists bring a precisely defined ìscriptî to experiments for

How does the domain or subject matter of a decision problem affect the outcome of the decision? Although decision-making research typically dismisses content as merely a cover story, the present research shows that it plays a fundamental role in the decision process by influencing the information processing that underlies it. An experiment is reported in which the same basic decision problem was presented in several content domains (legal traffic tickets, academic course grades, stock investments, and casino gambling). The changes in content led to changes in both strategies and mental representations, which in turn led to changes in decision outcomes, even though measures of the subjective utilities of the options remained unchanged. � 2001 Academic Press Life is a gamble. At least that is the expressed wisdom of many philosophers and behavioral scientists. This precept has led to a large literature of decisionmaking studies in which people are asked to make ratings and choices of monetary gambles like those they would encounter in casinos. Lopes (1983) described the simple monetary gamble as playing the same role in decision research that the fruit fly occupies in genetics. The prevailing view in the These data were presented at the 1998 Annual Meetings of the Psychonomic Society and Society for Judgment and Decision Making. This study was supported by NSF Grant SBR 9816458, NIMH Grant R01 MH58362, and the Psychology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It is based on the doctoral dissertation of the first author. The authors thank Walter Kintsch for advice on this project as well as two anonymous reviewers who made substantial suggestions for revisions. Address correspondence and reprint requests to David A. Rettinger, Psychology Department,

Addressing climate change: Psychology’s contribution

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Aimee Drolet, Ellie Fang, Art Markman, Atanu Sinha, the helpful editor, and reviewers; and technical assistance from Carolyn Cohen, Jeff Robinson, Laura Brown, and Noe lle Triaureau. They also thank Bill Yost for recruiting participants from his class. The order of authorship is random. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Shi Zhang, 110 Westwood Plaza B412, UCLA--Anderson School, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Fax: (310) 206-7422. E-mail: shi.zhang@ anderson.ucla.edu. 192 0749-5978/99 $30.00 Copyright # 1999 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Making an option unavailable in this case would have a bigger impact than in a situation in which all options have nonalignable differences. Nonalignable differences are difficult to process and are less likely to make people aware that there is very much information about the options for decision making. This explanation and the interaction effect between option limitation and feature alignability

Cultural narratives such as those mentioned in religious texts and folk stories are instrumental in teaching core cultural moral values. In this paper, we investigate the role of cultural narratives in understanding novel moral situations. We examine whether the processes by which core cultural narratives are applied in people‘s lives follow the principles of analogical retrieval and mapping. In particular, we examine how analogical accessibility influences the use of canonical moral narratives. We also show how access to different moral stories results in differences in moral preference across cultures. We report on the results of two experiments performed among Iranian and American participants. Our results indicate that analogical accessibility to cultural narratives that are similar in structure to a given dilemma is the differentiating factor in our participants‘ responses across the different variants and between the two cultural groups.

Despite robust evidence from behavioral decision making demonstrating context effects on choice, most neural studies on choice under risk and uncertainty have involved monetary gambles. We instructed participants to make choices under uncertainty in life and cash domains. Participants exhibited greater risk aversion, conflict, and sensitivity to negative feedback in the life domain, which we attribute to valuation of human lives. Supporting this assertion, choices to save lives activated the dorsal striatum, consistent with its role in context-sensitive reward processing. In contrast, choices to save cash activated the posterior insula, which we attribute to its role in probability signaling and risk prediction. Our findings highlight dissociable and context-dependent neural systems underlying choice under uncertainty.

Experimental practices in economics:

shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap began to play his violin at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington D.C. Over the next 43 minutes that he played, 1,097 people passed him by. Among them, only seven stopped to listen for at least a minute. Twenty-seven gave him money, most without breaking their pace, for a grand total of $32 and change. Only one person, who gave the man $20—more than half of what he earned—realized that the “fiddler ” was Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most celebrated musicians, who had just played six timeless pieces of music on a violin handcrafted by Stradivari in 1713 and worth an estimated 3.5 million dollars. Two days earlier, Bell had performed at a theater in Boston where merely pretty good seats sold for $100. This study organized by The Washington Post (Weingarten, April 8, 2007) poignantly illustrates the importance of context on subjective valuation. As Weingarten put it, “He [Bell] was, in short, art without a frame. ” The Bell demonstration, of course, was not designed to carefully disentangle the possible causal determinants of people’s ostensible indifference toward beauty in a mundane environment, but rather to conjure in our minds the idea that, in two disparate contexts, the same man playing the same music on the same exquisite

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